As communications networks have increased in both capacity and capability, applications have demanded an increasing amount of data. Presently, cellular networks are in their fourth generation (“4G”) where voice services are being ported from switch based systems to packet based systems, video calls and multi-media streaming are typical scenarios, and social networking and electronic mail applications constantly receive notifications and other data from web services and/or applications over the Internet.
Developing communications environments into heterogenous networks (“hetnets”) that combine cellular networks with unlicensed spectra, such as Wi-Fi networks has increased network capacity and a mechanism to load balance servicing data requests.
However, the advantages of larger capacity communications environments are offset by the proliferation of user equipment such as smartphones, wireless tablets, and laptop computers connected via cellular modems. Specifically, user equipment has diversified to larger form factors and more powerful processors which in turn have increased user expectations for higher resolution and higher fidelity multimedia experiences.
However, different applications have different data use profiles. For example, data demands of an Internet news browser are typified by brief bursts of high data use as a user requests content, followed by extremely low data use as the user reads or otherwise consumes the content. In contrast, a user watching a video has a more extended periods of high data use as a video buffer is filled.
Accordingly, there is an opportunity to develop a way to control quality of service, given limited communications capacity compared to application data demand, on a per application basis, not presently in the art.